When in doubt, “Alt-TAB it out”.

I’ve spent the better part of 45 hours of the 72 hours knee deep in TBSM v4.2 solution development. The TBSM administrator’s laptop environment was far from ideal (1Gb Mem) and he was using FF3 as his browser with Sun JRE 1.6. Throughout the course of developing the TBSM solution, we experienced many of the usual “possessed”, random and ghost like behaviors that can be experienced when working with this type of set up in a web based, Java application. I finally had him downgrade to FF2 and JRE 1.6 and this nearly eliminated many of the things we were seeing with FF3.

My current theory is that there are some significant “session”, “state” or “context” things happening when interacting with certain TBSM configuration screens, especially when additional pop up windows spring out for configuration steps. You’ll often just be unable to complete the task, the browser window will not respond, things won’t advance to next step, delete, update, etc.

What I found was that a simple “Alt-TAB” to shift the “context” away from the current browser window to something else and then “Alt-TAB” back to the same browser window and things are all back to normal. I’m not a Java guru by any means and don’t profess to be in tune with all the operating methods of TIP within TBSM v4.2, but there’s something of a “perfect storm” happening when the end user system, browser, JRE, etc. interact with TBSM that these windowing, mouse actions, etc. cause a lot of very weird, abnormal and painful occurrences for the TBSM admin and potentially a TBSM end user.

If you’re experiencing something odd like this, give the “ALT-Tab” trick a try. If things just randomly occur as I’ve described, consider your laptop/desktop environment, browser and JRE versions as a potential issue. If you can consistently recreate some weird behavior at least a few times, even after killing your browser and/or restarting TBSM, consider opening a PMR!

Links that I have found interesting for May 28th:

• Rivermusings » Blog Archive » Events and Alerts – Chief Science Officer’s View – However, we neglected to appreciate that we had thrown away some very useful information. For instance, the reduction of events into alerts involved the disposal of the content of an event, in favour of updating attributes (such as count, last occurrence) of an alert.
  With advancements/progression in database technology, RiverMuse can abandon the alert centric view of Netcool, and now embrace the world of events.

  RiverMuse defines an event as a point in the development of the state of a system. Some events warrant the creation of an alert. RiverMuse defines such alerts as a state of the system requiring intervention from an operator.

  For every alert there may be many events, each being an agreed state of evolution of the alert (assignment, diagnosis, closure). There may be many events that never create an alert, but nevertheless must be recorded.

  We make no assumptions about the retrospective importance of an event; we record everything.

• Dev Revival: Re-evaluating IT’s place in the Org Chart: Part 3 – Evaluation of the IT leader – Every member of the organization has an impact on the corporate strategy and tactics.
• Dev Revival: Re-evaluating IT’s place in the Org Chart: Part 2 – Evaluating IT’s needs – The CIO/CTO like every other resource in an organization needs the following four types of support from their supervisor:
  · Sufficient political capital to propel their vision.
  · Sufficient time with the supervisor to understand and implement the primary objectives.
  · Proper opportunities to contribute to the organization.
  · The ability to learn from their supervisor and grow as a resource.
• Dev Revival: Re-evaluating IT’s place in the Org Chart: Part 1 – Business value – To aid in determining IT's business value, the following are a few real world examples of the types of value an IT organization is expected to provide. In your organization, IT most likely derives its value from a combination of these three examples. However, for this exercise we are trying to identify the greatest long term impact.